War Stories
by rayemars
Summary: Six ficlets about Roy and Kimberly at Ishvar, no real spoilers past episode 15. Mild slash in three and four.
1. uniforms

Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.

Beware of shifting tenses.  
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**-'**

"It's probably heatstroke," Kimberly says casually, gesturing to Roy's uniform.

No one wears the jackets off-duty. Most of the soldiers and alchemists strip down to t-shirts, but Roy obstinately continues to wear long sleeves. He told Maes that he sunburns too easily. He shifts everyone else's attention to different subjects.

He doesn't attempt that with Kimberly--the other man knows misdirection too well.

"We're here for a reason," Roy replies, giving Kimberly and his undershirt a cold look. "This is a war, not some--" he starts to say 'game' but he knows how Kimberly will react, with that slow smirk and that damned _attitude_ "--place to relax."

Kimberly shrugs, folds his arms behind his head. "Whatever helps you kill them."

(Roy is always the one who walks away from their conversations.)


	2. calcium

Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.  
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**-'**

"Where'd you get 'Crimson' from, anyway?" Roy asks one afternoon.

Kimberly gives him a lopsided grin. "Do you know how to make explosions red?"

"Blood?" Roy replies bitterly. He's growing sharper as one year drags into two, tenser, lashing out more. The same goes for many alchemists and soldiers, but Kimberly prefers to study Roy's slow breaking.

"Calcium," he replies.

At Roy's look, he explains: "I blew up half the supplies for my practical," adding a rounded gesture. "Pulling in the calcium was difficult, but it got me the license."

Roy tilts his head slightly. "That makes sense. . . . Where did you get it from? There couldn't have been enough in the water."

"That was some of it," Kimberly acknowledges. "There was an old shed hidden near the back. Plaster has gypsum, and so do aluminum alloys." He stretches. "And there's calcium in bones."

After a moment, he's rewarded with Roy's flat, disgusted look, which only brings his grin back. "Wanna see?"

Roy exhales, but doesn't say anything, which Kimberly takes for consent.

They are later reprimanded by a superior officer for blowing up a table. (The salt stolen from the kitchen would be blamed on the cooks.)


	3. the red stone

Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.  
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**-'**

They receive the red stone the morning before the battle, and are told to be adjusted to it by nightfall.

Roy takes his gloves and his ring and goes out two dunes past the edges of the camp to test it. He snaps his fingers faintly the first time, aiming at the horizon, and the flame darts two meters.

He snaps hard the second time, and it spreads eight, wider than he could have made it before without concentrating.

Roy stares at the ring for a good minute.

Then he snaps again, focusing on controlling the flame more than maintaining it, making it zigzag in sharp lines before him. It only takes a little effort to draw in more oxygen from the still air, to keep the flame going and growing.

He pulls in more, then concentrates and splits the flame in two. Roy pushes the sections apart and pulls them together again, twining them briefly before letting them remerge into one flame.

It's so . . . _easy_, now.

He snaps his fingers on both hands next time, sending the flames just far enough out that the heat isn't unbearable, and then twists them around each other again and concentrates on not letting them merge. That's also easier than it should be, so he curls the flames horizontally into a cylinder, into a whirlwind, a pillar, and he laughs because screaming doesn't do any good out here.

It's echoed behind him. Roy turns sharply and only barely keeps his hand still. When he sees Kimberly, he thinks he shouldn't have bothered.

Kimberly's swaggering when he walks, so that the red stone around his neck sways back and forth. His hands are in his pockets in a gesture of goodwill, but the smirk on his face is wide.

"I bet you could kill a dozen people with one snap," he says, and the rich, pleased tone of his voice makes Roy tense and turn back around.

"Mm, no," Kimberly goes on. "Two dozen." The sand crunches under his boots as he approaches, stopping closer than decent behind Roy. Hands press against his sides a second later, and Roy jerks forward automatically, without checking for the tingle of alchemy against his skin.

"Or a little less," Kimberly muses, correcting himself. "All those buildings will interrupt the oxygen. And when they catch on fire, that's even less to work with. Shepherd them out to the dunes, it's more to your advantage."

"Stop," Roy says hoarsely. "Just--_stop_."

Kimberly steps forward again, grasps the wrist of the hand with the ring, and pulls it up, examining it over Roy's shoulder. He's close enough now that Roy can feel the necklace's stone pressing malleably against his back.

He doesn't move away. There's no reason to; he knows Kimberly isn't merciful enough to blow off his hands. Not with what tonight's bringing.

"I'll look for you," Kimberly murmurs, rubbing a finger against Roy's knuckle, just below the ring. "I want to see it."


	4. immediately after

Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.

This is the chapter that got the M rating for safety's sake; non-explicit slash.  
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**-'**

The alchemists began trailing back to the camp a few hours before sunrise. A layer of dust from the fires and the collapsed buildings hung over the area and made it harder to distinguish between allies and enemies, and anyway the Ishvarites were all dead. Roy came into the tent shedding clothing: gloves, jacket, boots. His roommate was already curled on his own cot, facing the canvas wall. Roy couldn't bring himself to speak to him.

An hour later, when the man began sobbing helplessly, he wondered if it would have helped. He was shaking so badly that it resembled a seizure; Roy lugged him to the medical tent and hoped that this feeling of mindless autopilot existence wouldn't wear off soon.

He met Kimberly along the way, strolling toward his own tent with a faint smile. Maybe he couldn't sleep, either, but Roy thought it more likely that he had just come back from the slaughter. Kimberly snorted at the sight of the man Roy was practically carrying, but turned and began following him.

"You could help," Roy said harshly.

"I can take some of the weight away," Kimberly offered.

Roy didn't say any more.

There were a lot of people in the medical tent, most of them injured soldiers from earlier days, too many of them alchemists looking for sedatives to make it to the morning. The doctors were keeping a strict eye on the amount being taken.

Roy left his roommate in Armstrong's company and made his way back to the tent wearily. Kimberly was still following behind him; at some point he'd started humming a tuneless little song under his breath.

When he arrived, Roy hesitated, holding the flap open for several seconds longer than was necessary. Kimberly stopped humming.

Roy let the flap fall behind him. When Kimberly entered a second later, he was already unbuttoning his shirt.

"I'm taking advantage of you," Kimberly said later, once they'd gotten on the cot, as he shoved off his pants. Roy's stomach twisted at the almost gleeful tone in his voice.

"You've killed people before today, Flame," he added, bracing an arm beside Roy's head and staring down at him, eyes bright. The red stone necklace hung between them. "Is it the quantity that's making you a masochist?"

"Shut _up_," Roy hissed, wishing that Kimberly would stop smiling faintly like this was the best day of his life, and wrapped a hand around his cock.

Kimberly was quiet-- relatively--after that, but he didn't stop smiling. Roy could feel it against his skin even after he squeezed his eyes shut.

Afterward, Kimberly tossed the stone over his shoulder, out of the way, and studied him. Roy stared at the opposite wall, trying to fall asleep before he could start thinking again.

When the muscles his legs began to ache, he knocked his heel against Kimberly's ankle. Kimberly shifted over as much as the cot allowed.

"Some of them escaped," he said, yawning. "We've got clean up duty tomorrow."

The smile was still there; Roy could see it from the corner of his eyes. He closed them.

"You're sick," he muttered.

"Honest," Kimberly corrected, pushing away.


	5. breaking point

Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.

And now, a completely different Roy--but the basic theme is the same, so I included it with the other four.  
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**-'**

Roy got through most of his time at Ishvar fairly well. It wasn't until the end that everything began collapsing.

(He was--in hindsight--almost certain that the reason he began feeling guilt for his actions then was because he hadn't allowed himself to feel it earlier.)

The Ishvarlans had still had snipers in the second to last year. In his first week, Roy had been injured and trapped behind a wall that had once been a house with a few regular soldiers, and with snipers in the building across from them. A bullet had grazed his thigh, and Roy had clamped a hand to it before remembering his glove. His second glove had fallen when he'd been moving to pull it on and had been startled by one of the soldiers shoving him behind the wall. It lay on the sandy street less than half a meter away, visible through the remains of a door frame, but on the other side of the wall.

When the first of the soldiers had run out of ammo, the sergeant had told him to go get the glove. The man had, of course, been killed, but he threw it closer to the door frame, and they also managed to hit one of the snipers.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Roy had demanded, not looking at the body.

"They brought you alchemists in to end this," the sergeant had replied harshly. "We're not supposed to let you get killed."

Roy began working on an array then, something that would put up a wall long enough for him to reach the glove. It took longer than it should have because the wind kept spilling sand into the lines, ruining them, and they ran out of water waiting. Eventually Roy had used his blood to pack the sand down long enough to activate the array.

The Ishvarlans had shot at the wall after it went up, but it held, and the sergeant had grabbed Roy's glove. The man managed not to throw it at his chest.

The dead soldier's blood had gotten on the edges, but not the fingers, so Roy wiped his own blood off his hand and pulled it on. He sent the first flame through the window that the shots were coming from, and then concentrated hard and lit sparks off the gases released by the fire until he had burned the entire building from the inside out.

The soldiers shot the Ishvarlan that escaped through the side door without looking at Roy. He focused on bandaging his leg with a sleeve torn from the dead soldier's shirt, and ignored the crackling roar.

He reminded himself of the snipers, the dead man, how he had had to suck on a pebble to get moisture in his mouth and the way blood looked drawn into an array in the sand, whenever he started faltering. He reminded himself of that nameless sergeant's words and kept his gloves on at all times. He hadn't used to wear them in the camp until a few desperate Ishvarlans had attacked with grenades, and then he wore them in his sleep and kept them underneath the towel when he showered.

("You had it in your **pocket**," Crimson had said, finding Roy in the medical tent getting his leg bandaged when he came in with a new set of second-degree burns on his left hand. Roy would wonder later whether Kimberly would have fingerprints left by the end of the war. "Are you stupid or suicidal, Flame?"

"I had one on," Roy had muttered. "The second one would have been overkill to use."

"The soldiers don't keep their spare clips out of reach." Crimson had looked at him even as he'd alchemized a pitcher of water cold and begun pouring it over his hand. "There's better ways to die."

Rumors about the Crimson alchemist wouldn't start for another year, and Gran would keep them smothered for several months after they did; but when Roy finally began to hear them, he remembered that look and couldn't bring himself to feel stunned.)

He got through the daily fighting as well as anyone else. He got through the massacre with the red stone through a combination of detachment--keeping his thoughts focused on the chain reactions of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, noting the difference in the feel when he ignited the wooden buildings or the oil that the Ishvarlans used for cooking--and sheer inability to process so much destruction and death. He breathed through his mouth and avoided the slow-decomposing explosions that Kimberly had planted around the area, moving to safety and then using the volatile gases given off by the burning wood and plaster to feed his own fires. He went back to the camp when the orders to desist came, and if his sleep wasn't peaceful, he managed to get enough of it not to collapse the next day as they continued to clean up the surrounding areas.

Roy survived the war as well as anyone else who didn't feed on that sort of thing. He moved through the last week of the actual fighting in almost surreal state, but he endured it.

It was the Rockbells that almost killed him.

Traitors by dint of treating the enemy as well as their own men, Gran had told him. Had ignored several demands by the military to stop. The fighting was nearly finished now, and Marcoh was doing the work of three surgeons with his stone, so there was no reason to keep them around as backup doctors; eliminate them, Flame.

Roy had meant to shoot them quickly, to end it fast. To kill the wife first so she wouldn't have to see her husband die and he wouldn't have to hear anymore high screaming. But the man had thrown himself in front of her as she ducked down; the shot had gone through his heart relatively cleanly, but on its exit it caught her in the throat and nicked the artery.

Roy had had to shoot her again, in the back, as she clung to the desk and knocked over a picture frame and two pens in an attempt to get away. She would have died of the neck wound, he'd known, but not soon enough.

Most of the blood had come from her; the artery had splattered more than Roy expected.

It was the blood that had done it, he figured out, years later. It took those years for him to be able to think about it--years of being away from the East and doing a majority of his duties from a desk and being force-fed normalcy and homemade dinners from Maes and having a **plan**, a plan that bordered on insane and demanded horrible self-abasement at times and constantly required his attention because even one mistake could end everything--it took those years of not being in Ishvar before he could think back with any kind of objectivity.

He'd been relying on alchemy almost entirely by the end--certainly after they'd been given the red stone, but also up to a month before that. He had still been using his gun, but rarely, and it had been almost half a year since he'd shot someone so near to him. And he'd never shot civilians in their own home before. And the fires cauterized wounds even as they killed, so the corpses rarely bled much even after he passed by them.

It was the blood that had stayed with him, through the nights and the bottles of wretched alcohol that the higher officers were pretending not to notice were being transmuted illegally in the back of the mess hall. The blood, and the way the woman's body had shuddered as she collapsed to the floor after the second shot, and the way the man's hand had fallen over the picture when they had stacked the bodies.

He still had a harder time seeing the corpses of women than of men, if he was honest about it. Both Hawkeye and Havoc had noticed, and included the detail in their briefings whenever it was necessary, so that he would be prepared and keep his face straight.

It was also the reason he preferred to leave the shooting up to Riza. He had never really hated alchemy, even at the worst of times--alchemy was meant to be a _creative_ process, it was _people_ who chose to use it destructively, and it was a lot easier to hate those in the military who'd decided to use alchemists than the skills that he had studied years to gain. It was easier to hate Kimberly than the gloves that Roy himself had designed.

The gloves were still his weapon of choice; but the war had left him with a permanent dislike of guns. Some days even the smell of the powder turned his stomach, reminded him of soot and blood and misuse.


	6. rifles

Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.  
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**-'**

Kimberly was appalled at the number of alchemists who lacked sufficient gun training.

After the third one died, twice-weekly shooting sessions with multiple guns became mandatory, even though Ishvarlan guerrillas were attacking their supply trains and it was risky to waste so many bullets. Within half a year, all the alchemists were well enough trained to turn a previously fatal situation into a near-fatal one.

Kimberly had been excused from the sessions. As the days slipped by, heavy with sand and dry heat, he observed the skin of Flame's shoulder turn raw and blistered and then calloused, watched him scrub his hand for up to an hour afterward so the residual gunpowder wouldn't stain his gloves.


End file.
